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Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

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I am posting this ebay item number for an Emulator which plugs in in place of the floppy drive on Keyboards and pianos. I have installed them on both Yamaha and Technics and they work fine. Cost $A25 delivere…

I am posting this ebay item number for an Emulator which plugs in in place of the floppy drive on Keyboards and pianos. I have installed them on both Yamaha and Technics and they work fine. Cost $A25 delivered, will take about 1/2 hour to install

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

I brought one of these USB Emulators, for my Technics 6500, took out the floppy drive and then noticed a post on another website that showed a switch being fitted or the emulator will show an error when loading. This put me off installing the emulator.

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Thank you for your post.
I have no knowledge of the problem you mention.
I currently have a KN2400 also a Yamaha CVP 209 that I have fitted these emulators, One of my son's also has one fitted to his 2400, all with no problem. You have to use a blank USB stick to format them when first installed

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

I have purchased a GOTEK SFRM72-FU-DL floppy emulator for my Technics KN1000. On removing the original floppy drive module from the keyboard there is no power cable connection between the Technics interface board and the floppy drive - There is just a single 34pin cable.

Just connecting this interface cable to the GOTEK stops the keyboard powering up. I can provide a 5v supply for the GOTEK if required but I assume there must be some nonstandard use of 'unused' data lines to provide power to the original floppy drive.

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

. The emulators I have used on 4 of my instruments have just been the cheap ones off ebay from China, in each case just plugged that multi pin plug in, formatted it and away it went...Suggest you make a post on Synthzone, there are a couple of electronic technics gurus on there. Possibly better still is the site you are on for seeking technical help [email protected] never experienced a problem with them not powering up. regards Jim

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Hi I think the Technics format is diffrent from a PC. I put a flopy disk in my PC from my Technics WSA1, I found the PC cant read Technics format so if the stick you are useing on your Technics is formated on a PC Technics keys wont understand the format. I might be wrong.

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

If you have a problem with your PC reading the USB, try the following
1 Format the usb on the PC
2 Format the usb on the keyboard
3 switch the power off on the keyboard
4 Hold the two buttons down on the Emulator and whilst doing so switch the power on
5 When the emulator has gone through all of its digital read out release the two buttons
6 Format once more
7 Insert usb in PC

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Jim,

Thanks very much for helping out here.

Sam,

My WSA1 reads PC floppies and vice versa, possibly the heads in one of your drives are misaligned. Though I should add that not all PC floppies can read all Technics disks in my experience. I use a Freecom USB floppy drive and I hear that Alps and Sony drives also work very well.

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Hi there.

So I just swapped out my 3.5" floppy for a USB flash drive floppy emulator in my Technics KN6500. Was pretty straight forward and I did a video posted to YouTube. You can check it out at :http://youtu.be/A_MYHvUuFjk

Re: Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Hello all, if I convert to an emulator how do I play my music created and saved on flopys. I have 6 flopys with music I have created on my WSA1?
I purchased my first WSA1 from a shop in London brand new for £800 pounds. 7 years down the road I sold it for £400 2 years later wished I haden't. Recently found one on ebay for 400 pounds. Some time or other it had been dropped had cracked cheak on the pitch bend and mod end. It had 2 broken circuit boards on the pitch bend now been remade by my dear brother, be glad to get it all back together and start useing it. Then Ill have ago at an emulator.

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Hi there.

I don't know the WSA1 but on my KN6500 what I did was the following.

1) Copy all the music from the floppy disks onto my laptop computer. I did it by creating folders like disk 1, disk 2, disk 3 -- like that and then copied files from each floppy into the folders. If your laptop doesn't have a floppy like mine, I used an external 3.5" floppy drive to do so.

2) One the USB flash drive is formated by the emulator I then plug it into my laptop.

3) Now I copy the songs from the folders I made (disk 1, disk 2, ect) on the USB drive. Now once all the songs are copied (Just the songs -- not the folders) I take it back to the keyboard.

4) This is where it gets a bit complicated -- I'm going to do a YouTube video on this subject soon. With the USB flash drive plugged in and the flash drive should be displaying 000 as the number code, load one song at a time into your keyboard. When the song is in the keyboard's memory, switch the emulator from 000 to 001 (like disk 1) and save the song you have in memory. Once saved, go back to 000 and load the next song into the keyboard's memory and then back to 001 and save this song. Keep doing this until you have save all the songs that you have loaded onto the USB flash drive, When done, go back to your laptop and then erase all the songs from disk 1, then copy the songs from the disk 2 folder and then go back the keyboard do the steps above again, but this time save the songs to 002. And so on and so on.

Does this make sense? When you go to your laptop, and load songs you can only load songs into the root of the USB drive (this is the 000 position). You cannot see the songs loaded into 001 and 002 partitions when viewing on a PC. You will only see those songs when you select that partition number on your emulator.

If you have desktop PC at home you could purchase a second emulator for it so you could install the emulator directly in the PC -- THEN you could copy songs on to the USB flash drive directly on a PC.

Re: Replace floppy drive with USB Emulator

Most of these usb emulators don't work with 720k drive interfaces as these are very different to the 1.44 ones. If your keyboard has a standard 1.44mb floppy interface then there is no reason why you can't fit a standard floppy drive or a usb interface however my customers have come back to me saying they cannot get on with it. I don't know if they have improved recently but I stopped fitting them some time ago as they were very much a computer geek add in that didn't go down well with the average home user! I guess it depends on how you like your technology to behave!